Headquarters nights; a record of conversations and experiences at the headquarters of the german army in France and Belgium

HEADQUARTERS
NIGHTS

v- •

Book Notes

The Atlantic Monthly Press, cele-
brating its twenty-fifth anniversary,
recalls its first publication, Vernon
Kclloggs "Headquarters' Nights,"
which appeared on Oct. 2. 1917.
Since that time the press has
brought out 473 titles, three of them
Pulitzer Prize winners and eighteen
of them book club selections. In 1925,
Little. Brown took over the publica-
tion of all books bearing the Atlan-
tic Monthy Press imprint; last year
both parties signed a fifty-year con-
tract on the same basis.

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Headquarters Nights

Headquarters Nights

A Record of Conversations and Experiences

at the Headquarters of the German

Army in France and Belgium

By Vernon Kellogg

The Atlantic Monthly Press
Boston

Copyright, 1017
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS, INC.

FIRST PRINTING, SEPTEMBER, 1917

SECOND PRINTING, OCTOBER, 1917

CONTENTS

PAGE

Biographical Note 7

Foreword by Theodore Roosevelt. ... 13

The Headquarters of the Great General

Staff 15

Von Bissing's Headquarters 57

A Belgian Record 105

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Vernon Kellogg graduated from the uni-
versity of his native state of Kansas in 1889.
After winning his master's degree, he studied
at Cornell, and subsequently spent several
years abroad specializing upon entomology
and biology at the University of Leipzig, and
considerably later at the University of Paris.
For the past twenty years, he has been a
professor of entomology in Stanford Uni-
versity, writing and lecturing on problems of
life in a multitude of its most interesting and
extraordinary forms.

Soon after the war broke out, Professor
Kellogg, pacifist and humanitarian by con-
viction, obtained a furlough from his univer-
sity and went abroad to devote himself to the
alleviation of human suffering. It was not
long before he joined his friend of long stand-
ing, Mr. Herbert Hoover, in the memorable
enterprise of the Commission for the Relief
of Belgium, of which he has become the official
historian. In connection with this work of

Headquarters Nights

civilian relief, it is worth recording that his
wife, Charlotte Hoffman Kellogg, was the
only woman member of that commission.
Both Professor and Mrs. Kellogg spent their
strength and energy to the utmost upon the
cause; and in the years which preceded the
inevitable intervention of the United States,
it was Professor Kellogg's duty to serve
during considerable periods as a sort of
informal ambassador of the C. R. B., both at
the Headquarters of the Great General
Staff and at the Headquarters of the German
Army of Occupation of Belgium. The unique
opportunities given through this official yet
intimate acquaintance with the German higher
command and with German civilians of im-
portance are set forth in this little book, which
incidentally becomes an illuminating record
of the conversion of a reasoned pacifist into
a supporter of the great and necessary war.

In an article published in the Atlantic
Monthly Professor Kellogg once gave a de-
scription of the surroundings in which he
lived during those tense months. "The
Great Headquarters," he wrote, "is quiet.
The loudest sounds there come from the

8

Headquarters Nights

playing of children in the streets. In the
larger buildings of the town sit many officers
over maps and dispatches. Telephones and
telegraph instruments, stenographers, mes-
sengers, all the bustle of busy but quiet offices,
are there. The General Staff, the General
Quartermaster's group, the General Intend-
ant's department, scores, aye, hundreds, of
officers, play here the war game for Germany
on the chessboard whose squares are bits of
Europe.

"The small gray town is another head-
quarters, too; it is the great headquarters of
all relief work that goes on in the North of
France. Here lives, by permission and ar-
rangement with the German staff, the Ameri-
can head of the neutral relief work — he and
one other American who is the local head of
the district including a hundred and fifty
thousand people around the town. They
live in a large comfortless house, and with
them two ( lerman staff officers as official
protectors and friendly jailers. And they,
too, are part of the neutral relief work, for no
man can live with it and not become part of
it. It is too appealing, too gripping.

9

Headquarters Nights

"We had seven orderlies and two chauffeurs,
for we are provided with two swift gray mili-
tary motors for our incessant inspecting.
One of the orderlies is named cook, and he
cooks, in a way. Another was a barber before
he became corporal, which was convenient.
And another blacked my shoes and beat my
clothes in the garden with a rough stick and
turned on the water full flow in our improvised
bath at a given hour each morning, so that I
had to get up promptly to turn it off before it
flooded the whole house.

" Quite four nights of each seven in the week
there were other staff officers in to dinner,
and we debated such trifles as German Mili-
tarismus, the hate of the world for Germany,
American munitions for the Allies, submarin-
ing and Zeppelining, the Kaiser, the German
people.

"We were not all of one mind. 'Now all
keep still,' demands my officer, the Haupt-
mann Graf W., 'and my American will tell
us just what the Americans mean by German
Militarismus.'

"They all kept still for the first ten words
and then all broke out together :

10

Headquarter s Nights

" 'No, we shall tell you what it is. Organ-
ization and obedience — nothing more, noth-
ing less. It is that that makes Germany
great. And it is that that you must come to
if you would be a great nation.'

"I protested that I thought we are already
a great nation.

" 'Well, then,' they answered, 'if you would
continue great. Otherwise you will smash.
Democracy, bah! license, lawlessness, dis-
ruption. Organize, obey, — or smash.' And
they believe it. "

When the actual distribution of Belgian
relief had passed out of American control,
Professor Kellogg followed Mr. Hoover to his
new patriotic work, and is now an important
member of the organization which controls
the distribution and influences the consump-
tion of the food of one hundred millions of the
American people.

n

FOREWORD

One of the most graphic pictures of the
German attitude, the attitude which has
rendered this war inevitable, is contained in
Vernon Kellogg's 'Headquarters Nights.'
It is a convincing, and an evidently truthful,
exposition of the shocking, the unspeakably
dreadful moral and intellectual perversion of
character which makes Germany at present a
menace to the whole civilized world.

The man who reads Kellogg's sketch and
yet fails to see why we are at war, and why
we must accept no peace save that of over-
whelming victory, is neither a good American
nor a true lover of mankind.

Theodore Roosevelt.

Sagamore Hill,
August 26, 1917.

13

The Headquarters of the Great
General Staff

I

We do not hear much now from the
German intellectuals. Some of the pro-
fessors are writing for the German news-
papers, but most of them are keeping
silent in public. The famous Ninety-
three are not issuing any more proclama-
tions. When your armies are moving
swiftly and gloriously forward under the
banners of sweetness and light, to carry
the proper civilization to an improperly
educated and improperly thinking world,
it is easier to make declarations of what
is going to happen, and why it is, than
when your armies are struggling for life
with their backs to the wall — of a French
village they have shot and burned to ruin
for a reason that does not seem so good a
rca-ou now.

•7

Headquarters Nights

But some of the intellectuals still speak
in the old strain in private. It has been
my peculiar privilege to talk through
long evening hours with a few of these
men at Headquarters. Not exactly the
place, one would think, for meeting these
men, but let us say this for them: some
of them fight as well as talk. And they
fight, not simply because they are forced
to, but because, curiously enough, they
believe much of their talk. This is one
of the dangers from the Germans to
which the world is exposed: they really
believe much of what they say.

A word of explanation about the
Headquarters, and how I happened to
be there. It was — it is no longer, and
that is why I can speak more freely
about it — not only Headquarters but
the Great Headquarters — Grosses Haupt-
quartier — of all the German Armies of
the West. Here were big Von Schoeler,
General-Intendant, and the scholarly-

Headquarters Nights

looking Yon Freytag, General-Quartier-
mcister, with his unscholarly-looking,
burly chief of staff, Yon Zoellner. Here
also were Yon Falkenhayn, the Kaiser's
Chief of Staff, and sometimes even the
All-Highest himself, who never missed the
Sunday morning service in the long low
corrugated-iron shed which looked all
too little like a royal chapel ever to inter-
est a flitting French bomber.

But not only was this small gray town
on the Meuse, just where the water pours
out of its beautiful canon course through
the Ardennes, the headquarters of the
German General Staff — it was also the
station, by arrangement with the staff, of
the American Relief Commission's hum-
ble ununiformed chief representative for
the North of France (occupied French
territory). For several months I held
this position, living with the German
officer detached from the General Quar-
termaster's staff to protect me — and

[Q

Headquarters Nights

watch me. Later, too, as director of the
Commission at Brussels, I had frequent
occasion to visit Headquarters for con-
ferences with officers of the General
Staff. It was thus that I had opportunity
for these Headquarters Nights.

Among the officers and officials of
Headquarters there were many strong
and keen German militaristic brains —
that goes without saying — but there
were also a few of the professed intel-
lectuals— men who had exchanged, for
the moment, the academic robes of the
Aula for the field-gray uniforms of the
army. The second commandant of the
Headquarters town was a professor of
jurisprudence at the University of Mar-
burg; and an infantry captain, who lived
in the house with my guardian officer
and me, is the professor of zoology in one
of the larger German universities, and
one of the most brilliant of present-day
biologists. I do not wish to indicate his
person more particularly, for I shall say

20

Headquarters Nights

some hard things about him — or about
him as representative of many — and we
are friends. Indeed, he was Privat-docent
in charge of the laboratory in which I
worked years ago at the University of
Leipzig, and we have been correspondents
and friends ever since. How he came
to be at Headquarters, and at precisely
the same time that I was there, is a story
which has its interest, but cannot be told
at present.

Our house was rather a favored centre,
for 'my officer,' Graf W. — he always
called me 'my American,' but he could
no more get away from me than I from
him — is a generous entertainer, and our
dinners were rarely without guests from
other headquarters houses. Officers,
from veteran generals down to pink-
cheeked lieutenants, came to us and
asked us to them. The discussions, be-
gun at dinner, lasted long into the night.
They sat late, these German officers, over
their abundant wine— French vintages

21

Headquarters Nights

conveniently arranged for. And always
we talked and tried to understand one
another; to get the other man's point of
view, his Weltanschauung.

Well, I say it dispassionately but with
conviction: if I understand theirs, it is a
point of view that will never allow any
land or people controlled by it to exist
peacefully by the side of a people gov-
erned by our point of view. For their
point of view does not permit of a live-
and-let-live kind of carrying on. It is a
point of view that justifies itself by a
whole-hearted acceptance of the worst of
Neo-Darwinism, the Allmacht of natural
selection applied rigorously to human
life and society and Kultur.

Professor von Flussen — that is not
his name — is a biologist. So am I. So
we talked out the biological argument
for war, and especially for this war.
The captain-professor has a logically
constructed argument why, for the good
of the world, there should be this war,

22

Headquarters Nights

and why, for the good of the world, the
Germans should win it, win it completely
and terribly. Perhaps I can state his
argument clearly enough, so that others
may see and accept his reasons, too. Un-
fortunately for the peace of our evenings,
I was never convinced. That is, never
convinced that for the good of the world
the Germans should win this war, com-
pletely and terribly. I was convinced,
however, that this war, once begun, must
be fought to a finish of decision — a finish
that will determine whether or not Ger-
many's point of view is to rule the world.
And this conviction, thus gained, meant
the conversion of a pacifist to an ardent
supporter, not of War, but of this war;
of fighting this war to a definitive end —
that end to be Germany's conversion
to be a good Germany, or not much of
any Germany at all. My 'Headquarter^
Nights' an- the confessions of a converted
pacifist.

In talking it out biologically, we agreed

*3

Headquarters Nights

that the human race is subject to the
influence of the fundamental biologic laws
of variation, heredity, selection, and so
forth, just as are all other animal — and
plant — kinds. The factors of organic
evolution, generally, are factors in human
natural evolution. Man has risen from
his primitive bestial stage of glacial time,
a hundred or several hundred thousand
years ago, when he was animal among
animals, to the stage of to-day, always
under the influence of these great evo-
lutionary factors, and partly by virtue
of them.

But he does not owe all of his prog-
ress to these factors, or, least of all, to
any one of them, as natural selection,
a thesis Professor von Flussen seemed
ready to maintain.

Natural selection depends for its work-
ing on a rigorous and ruthless struggle
for existence. Yet this struggle has its
ameliorations, even as regards the lower
animals, let alone man.

24

Headquarters Nights

There are three general phases of this
struggle: —

1. An inter-specific struggle, or the
lethal competition among different ani-
mal kinds for food, space, and opportunity
to increase;

2. An intra-specific struggle, or lethal
competition among the individuals of a
single species, resultant on the over-pro-
duction due to natural multiplication by
geometric progression; and,

3. The constant struggle of individuals
and species against the rigors of climate,
the danger of storm, flood, drought, cold,
and heat.

Now any animal kind and its indi-
viduals may be continually exposed to
all of these phases of the struggle for
existence, or, on the other hand, any
one or more of these phases may be
largely ameliorated or even abolished for
a given species and its individuals. This
amelioration may come about through
a happy accident of time or place, or

23

Headquarters Nights

because of the adoption by the species of
a habit or mode of life that continually
protects it from a certain phase of the
struggle.

For example, the voluntary or involun-
tary migration of representatives of a
species hard pressed to exist in its native
habitat, may release it from the too severe
rigors of a destructive climate, or take it
beyond the habitat of its most dangerous
enemies, or give it the needed space and
food for the support of a numerous prog-
eny. Thus, such a single phenomenon
as migration might ameliorate any one
or more of the several phases of the strug-
gle for existence.

Again, the adoption by two widely
distinct and perhaps antagonistic species
of a commensal or symbiotic life, based
on the mutual-aid principle — thousands
of such cases are familiar to naturalists
— would ameliorate or abolish the inter-
specific struggle between these two species.
Even more effective in the modification

25

Headquarters Nights

of the influence due to a bitter struggle
for existence, is the adoption by a species
of an altruistic or communistic mode of
existence so far as its own individuals
are concerned. This, of course, would
largely ameliorate for that species the
intra-specific phase of its struggle for
life. Such animal altruism, and the bio-
logical success of the species exhibiting
it, is familiarly exemplified by the social
insects (ants, bees, and wasps).

As a matter of fact, this reliance by
animal kinds for success in the world
upon a more or less extreme adoption
of the mutual-aid principle, as contrasted
with the mutual-fight principle, is much
more widely spread among the lower
animals than familiarly recognized, while
in the case of man, it has been the greatest
single factor in the achievement of his
proud biological position as king of living
creatui

Altruism or mutual aid, as the biolo-
gist - prefer to call ii , to escape the tmpli-

27

Headquarters Nights

cation of assuming too much conscious-
ness in it — is just as truly a fundamental
biologic factor of evolution as is the cruel,
strictly self-regarding, exterminating kind
of struggle for existence with which the
Neo-Darwinists try to fill our eyes and
ears, to the exclusion of the recognition of
all other factors.

Professor von Flussen is Neo-Dar-
winian, as are most German biologists
and natural philosophers. The creed of
the Allmacht of a natural selection based
on violent and fatal competitive struggle
is the gospel of the German intellectuals;
all else is illusion and anathema. The
mutual-aid principle is recognized only
as restricted to its application within
limited groups. For instance, it may
and does exist, and to positive biological
benefit, within single ant communities,
but the different ant kinds fight desper-
ately with each other, the stronger de-
stroying or enslaving the weaker. Sim-
ilarly, it may exist to advantage within

28

Headquarters Nights

the limits of organized human groups — as
those which are ethnographically, nation-
ally, or otherwise variously delimited.
But as with the different ant species,
struggle — bitter, ruthless struggle — is the
rule among the different human groups.
This struggle not only must go on, for
that is the natural law, but it should go
on. so that this natural law may work
out in its cruel, inevitable way the salva-
tion of the human species. By its salva-
tion is meant its desirable natural evolu-
tion. That human group which is in the
most advanced evolutionary stage as
regards internal organization and form of
social relationship is best, and should, for
the sake of the species, be preserved at
the expense of the less advanced, the
less effective. It should win in the
struggle for existence, and this struggle
should occur precisely that the various
types may be tested, and the best not
only preserved, but put in position to
impose its kind of social organization — its

i

Headquarters Nights

Kultur — on the others, or, alternatively,
to destroy and replace them.

This is the disheartening kind of argu-
ment that I faced at Headquarters;
argument logically constructed on prem-
ises chosen by the other fellow. Add to
these assumed premises of the Allmacht
of struggle and selection based on it, and
the contemplation of mankind as a con-
geries of different, mutually irreconcilable
kinds, like the different ant species, the
additional assumption that the Germans
are the chosen race, and German social
and political organization the chosen
type of human community life, and you
have a wall of logic and conviction that
you can break your head against but can
never shatter — by head work. You long
for the muscles of Samson.

30

II

The danger from Germany is, I have
said, that the Germans believe what they
say. And they act on this belief. Pro-
fessor von Flussen says that this war is
necessary as a test of the German position
and claim. If Germany is beaten, it will
prove that she has moved along the
wrong evolutionary line, and should be
beaten. If she wins, it will prove that
she is on the right way, and that the rest
of the world, at least that part which we
and the Allies represent, is on the wrong
way and should, for the sake of the right
evolution of the human race, be stopped
and put on the right way — or else be
destroyed as unfit.

Professor von Flussen is sure that
Germany's way is the right way, and
that the biologic evolutionary factors

3

Headquarters Nights

are so all-controlling in determining
human destiny, that this being biolog-
ically right is certain to insure German
victory. If the wrong and unnatural
alternative of an Allied victory should
obtain, then he would prefer to die in the
catastrophe and not have to live in a
world perversely resistant to natural law.
He means it all. He will act on this
belief. He does act on it, indeed. He
opposes all mercy, all compromise with
human soft-heartedness. Apart from his
horrible academic casuistry and his con-
viction that the individual is nothing, the
State all, he is a reasoning and a warm-
hearted man. So are some other Ger-
mans. But for him and them the test of
right in this struggle is success in it. So
let every means to victory be used. The
only intelligence Germans should follow
in these days is the intelligence of the
General Staff; the only things to believe
and to repeat are the statements of the
official bureau of publicity.

32

Headquarters Nights

There is no reasoning with this sort
of thing, no finding of any heart or soul
in it. There is only one kind of answer:
resistance by brutal force; war to a de-
cision. It is the only argument in rebut-
tal comprehensible to these men at Head-
quarters into whose hands the German
people have put their destiny.

One evening we had a larger and more
distinguished dinner group than usual.

The Duke of , a veteran of 1870 and

very close to the Kaiser, altogether a per-
sonage, had come by motor with a small
staff from his headquarters near the
Champagne front. My officer was all of
a flutter with the importance and excite-
ment of the event. He coached all of us
— orderlies, myself, and resident guests
— as to our proper behavior during the
visit. This was to consist chiefly of
much stiff standing up, repeated formal
bows, and respectful silence. No one
was to start anything on his own initia-

33

Headquarters Nights

tive. We were to take the conversational
cue from His Highness. The Comman-
dant-professor of jurisprudence was there,
and a casual baron or two, and various
Headquarters officers.

The duke entered, to find us a fixed
row of effigies, hands on trouser-seams,
eyes front, chins up, in the receiving-
room. His Highness was a small be-
whiskered gentleman, very abrupt and
disconcerting in manner, but not at
all stupid, and very ready to express
his opinions on all subjects of war and
church history, his hobby.

As he surveyed the row of effigies his
keen eye spotted the ununiformed Amer-
ican, and he directed a questioning look
toward Graf W., the host. My officer
made a concise explanation of the situa-
tion, which the duke acknowledged with
a grunt of understanding and the sharp
question, —

'But does he speak German?'

Graf W. hastened to declare, 'Wie

34

Headquarters Nights

cin Eingcborener' — like a native — which
is far from true. Another grunt of
satisfaction, a critical stare of examina-
tion, and finally a direct phrase of formal
recognition. I reserved any exhibition
of my fluent German, and merely bowed.
My officer gave me an expressive look of
approval and found a later chance to
congratulate me on my 'success.' I sup-
pose not being ordered out of the room
may be called success, under the circum-
stances.

After giving the whole row a final
looking-over, His Highness mumbled
something, whereupon an aide-de-camp
stepped briskly up, clicked heels, and
held out to him a small box containing
several medals on yellow ribbons. They
were the insignia of some minor order in
his duchy. He presented one to one of
the barons, one to the Commandant-
professor of jurisprudence, and one to —
my officer's chief orderly, who acted as
hou^-e barber and head waiter! The

35

Headquarters Nights

baron and professor had done their best
and deepest bowing, but when Muller's
turn came, it was like morning gym-
nastics in the bedroom. 'Touch toes ten
times with finger-tips, legs remaining
unbent.' I fancied that the baron and
professor became less satisfied with their
honor, the more Miiller waxed enthusi-
astic. In fact, they did not put on their
orders immediately ; Miiller did. Finally,
my officer got our barber to stop bowing
— the duke wasn't even seeing him —
and we went into the dining-room.

At dinner the personally conducted
conversation leaped suddenly from church
history to Zeppelining. It was just after
one of those earlier London raids, when
the great city was practically defenseless,
and the German newspapers had been full
for several days of accounts of the enor-
mous damage and losses of life achieved
by the raid. As a matter of fact there
were some horrors — not extensive but
intensive horrors: women and babies in

36

Headquarters Nights

several houses, and an omnibusful of
passengers in a by-street, sickeningly
mangled and murdered.

The duke declared that Zeppelining
was stupid and the men who ordered
it fools. The table was struck silent.
A duke close to the Kaiser might say
such a thing, but no less a personage.
Zeppelining had been declared wise and
good by the General Staff and the Berlin
official publicity bureau. It was there-
fore wise and good. So one of the barons
ventured to remonstrate. It was the
one who had received his order along
with Muller, and in whom the champagne
had perhaps let some obscure natural
feeling of resentment get the better of the
well-learned feeling of proper gratitude
for his dubious distinction.

'But His Highness will recall,' said
the baron, 'the military advantage of
Zeppelining: the value of holding guns
and gunners in England which might
otherwise 1,«- .-• nt to the battle-line, and

.17

Headquarters Nights

the blowing up of munition factories,
and the — ah — the terror and the — well,
the military advantage generally. One
must not consider the — ah — other side
of the matter. A few — ah — non-combat-
ants, perhaps, but the military advantage,
that is the sole criterion.'

His Highness snorted audibly and
visibly.

'That is, of course, all that one does
take into consideration. It is precisely
and only because there is no military
advantage in Zeppelining that it is stupid
and the men who order it are stupid pigs.
We don't blow up any munition factories,
and for every miserable woman killed,
hundreds, aye, thousands of Englishmen
rush into the army to come over to the
front and fight us. We are doing their
recruiting for them.' He fixed the squirm-
ing recipient of his yellow ribbon with a
cold gray eye. 'We are all only thinking
of the military advantage. What are a
few — oh, pouf, why talk of it? My dear

38

Headquarters Nights

baron, I am perhaps as much a military
man as you' (this was withering scorn;
the baron was the Headquarters reader
of foreign newspapers!), 'and I repeat:
Zeppelining is bad, and it is bad simply
and entirely because it has no military
advantage.'

That ended Zeppelining for the moment,
until unlucky I — well, the very next
subject introduced was the attitude of
the neutral world, America in particular,
toward Germany. The newspaper-read-
ing baron suddenly turned to me.

'Why is this universal hate of Ger-
many? Why do you Americans hate us?'

It was too soon after what I had just
heard. I blurted out, —

'For things like the military advantage
of Zeppelining.'

My officer gave a scrape and a lurch;
something tipped over. Then he stared
— all of us stared — at the duke. His
Highness did not order me to the firing
squad or even to the cells. He did noth-

39

Headquarters Nights

ing, said nothing, to show any displeas-
ure. He looked steadily and thought-
fully at me, and then gruffly indicated
his pleasure that the company should
rise from the table. My officer recov-
ered his color and his equanimity.

I believe that His Highness knew
that answer all the time. But the rest
did not, and they do not understand it
now. 'Military advantage,' 'military
expediency' — how often have these
phrases blocked us of the Relief Com-
mission in our efforts in Belgium and
North France! No mercy, no 'women-
and-children' appeals, no hesitation to
use the torch and the firing squad, de-
portation, and enslavement. And it is
all a part of Professor von Flussen's
philosophy; the pale ascetic intellec-
tual and the burly, red-faced butcher
meet on common ground here. And
then they wonder why the world comes
together to resist this philosophy — and
this butchery — to the death !

-to

Ill

Late one afternoon we left Head-
quarters to dine with General von R.
down near the Champagne front. Mr.
Hoover, Chairman of the Commission,
and Mr. White, of its London office,
had come over to Brussels and on to
Headquarters for a conference in con-
nection with our work in Northern France;
and so we were all to go with my officer
and two or three other men of the General
Staff to receive this special attention
from a commanding general at the front.

We made an imposing procession in
three big gray military cars running
swiftly to the south. As the general's
chief of staff, who had come to Head-
quarters bo escort us personally, spoke
no English and did not like to hear
English spoken, he took me alone with

4'

Headquarters Nights

him in his car. He was a taciturn, crusty
major, with a thin, stern face and tight
lips.

His first remarks were certain direct
questions about conditions in London
and England. I could reply only that,
if such questions were asked me in
England about Germany or German-
occupied territory, I would not answer
them. He did not like it, but after a
little bullying settled into moody silence,
occasionally broken by curt remarks to
me, and brutally put instructions to his
soldier chauffeur. It was evident that
he did not like the idea of his general's
showing this high courtesy to the in-
truding Yankees. It was not a pleasant
excursion for any of us, and yet it was a
beautiful two hours' ride over smooth
tree-lined roads — the trees are mostly
gone now — through picturesque country
of wide outlooks.

Just at dusk we climbed slowly up a
gentle hill-slope. As we reached the flat

42

Headquarters Nights

summit and sped along over it, one
could see the road stretching far ahead,
a gently irregular white line dipping
out of sight into a valley in front, but
reappearing on the farther up-slope and
running there straight away into invisi-
bility. Just at the horizon, where the
hilltop met the heavens and the road
disappeared, the tower of a little church
silhouetted itself against the darkening
blue of the evening sky.

'This is the road to Rheims,' mut-
tered my companion. 'You can see it
from that church.'

I thrilled. The road to Rheims!
Rheims just there in front, and a shell
bursting over it — over the Cathedral,
say — could be seen from that little
church. I wanted to go right on along
that white line to that hilltop.

Later I really did go there, and be-
yond it even to the very verge of the
sad city itself. There is an extraordinary
little village of cellars — the houses above

n

Headquarters Nights

are mere stone-heaps — just behind the
German trenches in front of Rheims.
These cellars are occupied by two hundred
and thirty-three women and girls, sixty-
seven children, and four tottering old
men, the total remaining population of a
once picturesque and crowded village.
We wanted them to come away and be
housed farther back from the line. But
they prefer to live 'at home.' And so
we have fed these women and children
there two years. They live in their
cellars, with the shells moaning back
and forth over them whenever there is
'desultory artillery firing before Rheims.'
As we were running swiftly over the
flat hill-summit with the long view in
front of us, our driver, without being
instructed — and cursed — by the major,
suddenly slowed the car, and I noted the
major staring hard at a soldier's grave
by the roadside. There had been hard
fighting all about here and the graves
were numerous along the way. My

44

Headquarte r s Nights

companion turned abruptly to me, with a
thumb- jerk toward the grave.

'He was my best friend,' he said
gruffly; and with another jerk to the
front, he added, 'And my brother lies
under the shadows of that church-
tower there on the hill.'

I forgave him his gruffness.

Arrived at the general's headquarters
in a French industrial town now half in
ruins, we walked by a stiff row of orderlies
into a spacious house, and were shown
by other orderlies and a young lieutenant
to an upstairs room to brush off the white
chalk-dust of the Champagne road. My
officer had remained below. Suddenly
he came into our room, excited and with a
face of much concern. He told us swiftly
that a translation of President Wilson's
latest note, a short and sharp one, had
just been telephoned to the general from
Berlin. And tin- general and everybody
downstairs were violently incensed. He
wondered whether one of us had not

45

Headquarters Nights

better get suddenly ill, so that we should
have to go back at once without staying
for dinner.

This seemed absurd. We said that
the general could get ill and call off the
dinner if he wanted to, but we should
not. Poor Graf W. ! He had been
trained to abuse his subordinates and
cringe before his superiors, and it was
really a horrible position for him; he
felt, in a way, responsible for his Yankees,
and he wanted the occasion to go off
pleasantly. However, we had not written
the note, or done anything except come,
with no anticipations of pleasure, to eat
dinner with the general! And so we
insisted on going down.

It was a strenuous meal, not because
of an overabundance of things to eat
— it is a long time now since there has
been too much to eat in Germany, even
among generals — but because of the
situation. The general and his staff
were always polite, but never more than

46

Headquarters Nights

that. They were perfectly correct and
perfectly reserved. We talked much
and said little. The general declared an
interest in 'caring for the people.' He was
trying to reestablish the industries of
the region, he said. I had noted the
stacks of two factories smoking as we
entered the town. Such sights in Belgium
and North France have been unusual for
two years, and attract attention. I said
we were very glad to learn of his interest,
and asked what the factories were. He
turned to the gentleman on his other side.
But a less discerning young officer across
the table said they were making corrugated
iron. This is an article much used in
and behind the trenches.

There is also much cutting of trees
— French trees — and sawing of lumber
going on in occupied France. Wood
is also much used in the trenches. And
large herds of cattle are being pastured
in French pastures. They are German
cattle for the soldiers. The French cat-

47

4

Headquarters Nights

tie have long ago been eaten by
them.

I suppose all this is just war. But
when such things are given the color
before the world of 'restoring the indus-
tries of the people,' the specific object
of this restoration should be told. The
bald truth is that Governor von Bis-
sing's repeated declarations of rehabil-
itating industries in Belgium, and the
similar statements of the General Staff
for Northern France, are equivocations.
What has been strongly attempted has
been a forced exploitation of the people
for German military advantage. It has
been resisted by the simple but brave
and patriotic workingmen of the occupied
territories with a success that seems in-
credible in the face of the guns and
deporting trains all too familiar to them.
It is true, as has been said in criticism of
them, that the Belgians do not work.
They have little work of their own that they
can do, and they will not work for the

48

Headquarters Nights

Germans. That is one of the reasons for
the deportations, which have been, by
the way, one of the greatest of German
blunders — and brutalities — in this war.
But I must not write of Belgium now;
Headquarters was in Northern France.

It was not all sticking at Headquar-
ters. I traveled — always with my offi-
cer, of course — up and down and
across and back over all of occupied
France; from Lille to Longwy, from
Coucy-le-Chateau to Charleville. For
the purposes of our ravitaillement the
occupied French territory is divided
into six districts. These corresponded
with no political subdivisions of the
country, as departements and arrondisse-
ments, but were determined chiefly by
the original disposition of the German
armies, each of which, having a certain
degree of autonomy as regards the region
occupied by it, objected to any movement
of French feeding committees and our own

49

Headquarters Nights

American Commission representatives
across the borders of its own region.
We had, therefore, six district ravitaille-
ment centres, or headquarters, at each of
which were stationed one or two of our
representatives, who moved about more
or less freely in his district, each with a
specially detailed German officer of his
own — 'nurses,' we called them. It was
my privilege and duty as chief repre-
sentative, and my officer's as chief of
the officer group, to visit occasionally
each of the districts.

We traveled by military motor, my
officer and I in the tonneau, and a sol-
dier chauffeur and an orderly in the
driver's seat, each of them with a loaded
Mauser held erect in clamps by his
side. In each side-flap pocket of the
tonneau was a loaded Browning. We
were never shot at, nor did we ever
shoot at anybody, but the armament
gave the proper military tone to our
equipage. We ran frightfully fast, and

50

Headquarters Nights

I always had the uneasy feeling that I
should find my finish in North France,
not in a dramatic erasure by a stray
shell or casual bomb from overhead,
but in a commonplace motor smash-up.
As it came out, the only casualties
attending our 5000 or more kilometres
of mad running were among the few
remaining half-fed chickens of the French
villagers. We did once rather narrowly
miss being run over by the Crown Prince,
who sat on the front seat with an orderly,
and drove his own car like a hurricane.
As he swerved slightly to miss us, he
intrusted his life — and ours — to one of
his hands, while with the other he gave us
a debonnaire salute.

This extraordinary touring of North
France came finally to get strongly on
my nerves. It is such a sad land; such
a wreck of half-destroyed villages and
crumbled farm-houses, of stripped wood-
land and neglected fields. And the
people: all women and children and old

5«

Headquarters Nights

and infirm men! And the meagerness of
the food-supply, despite the best we could
do! We meant much to these people,
we eight or ten Americans moving about
among them; at least, they gave us un-
mistakably to understand that we did.
We represented the sympathy and en-
deavor of a great nation far away. Cut
off as these imprisoned French are from
all communication with their fighting
men across the terrible trench-lines; cut
off even from communication with each
other, if only a few miles apart, we
exemplified the freedom that still existed
somewhere, and the hope of the freedom
to come to them again. And we meant,
too, for them, the holding back of the
spectre of actual starvation.

The sights and the incidents of those
trips are too harrowing to exploit. They
are untellable, intimate memories for us,
but they went far in making us con-
vinced and bitter believers that the only
comprehensible answer to the German

52

Headquarters Nights

philosophy of ' raison d'Etat,' and 'military
exigency,' to these ravages of non-com-
batant countryside and village, is an
answer of force. Not that we wish to do
to them what they have done to others,
but to prevent them by force from ever
doing that again.

I could understand why the villages
along the Meuse were shot to pieces;
there was real fighting there — at least
in some of them. And there were some
more whose names I recalled as asso-
ciated with the desperate retreating
struggles of the overwhelmed French
and British. But there are many, many
others in which there was no fighting,
but just destroying. They have not
been enumerated as have the Belgian
towns; they have no sad fame in the
ears of the world: they are just name-
less scores of illustrations and results of
the German conception of the struggle
for existence as a contributory factor
in the evolution of human kind.

53

Headquarters Nights

There is, I suppose, a slight military
advantage in so maltreating and terri-
fying a conquered land that only a few
elderly Landsturmers, scattered here
and there over it, are sufficient as an
army of occupation. The rest of the
Landsturmers can be used in the trenches.
But it is a terrible price — of something —
to pay for this alleged military advantage.

I used to ask my officer about these
wrecked villages as we ran through them,
or stopped to inspect a local distributing
centre, or watch a soup-line, or get a
report, and always a piteous request,
from a feeding committee. He had a
stereotyped reply: 'Punishment.'

'Punishment for what?'

'For a civilian's shooting at a soldier;
or the village's harboring a spy; or a
failure to meet a requisition ; or something
or other.'

He never knew exactly; nobody ever
knew exactly; and I do not know ex-
actly. Not even with all the explana-

54

Headquarters Nights

tion from the captain-professor, who
explained it on a basis of biological
philosophy. Xor with the explanation
of the non-philosophizing fighters, who
simply said that it was necessary as a
military advantage. Nor with the ex-
planation of my officer, who, when I
continued to press him, would make an
ugly screwing gesture with closed fist,
which seemed to mean, 'Just do it to
them!'

I went into Northern France and Bel-
gium to act as a neutral, and I did act
as a neutral all the time I was there. If
I learned there anything of military
value which could be used against the
Germans I shall not reveal it. But I
came out no neutral. Also I went in an
ardent hater of war and I came out a
more ardent one. 1 have seen that side
of the horror and waste and outrage of
war which is worse than the side re-
vealed on tin- battlefield. How I hope
for the end of all war!

55

Headquarters Nights

But I have come out believing that
that cannot come until any people which
has dedicated itself to the philosophy
and practice of war as a means of human
advancement is put into a position of
impotence to indulge its belief at will.
My conviction is that Germany is such a
people, and that it can be put into this
position only by the result of war itself.
It knows no other argument and it will
accept no other decision.

56

Von Bissing's Headquarters

I

Twenty years ago the Samoan Is-
lands belonged to England, Germany,
and the United States. The Gordian
knot of trouble inevitably tied by such
a handling of Samoan affairs had its cut-
ting hastened by the famous hurricane of
1889, which piled up some men-of-war of
the ruling nations on the vicious coral
reefs of Apia harbor, and drove others in
safety out to sea.

This terrible common experience made
temporary friends of the struggling Eng-
lish, German, and American sailors and
Samoan boatmen, who had all been mu-
tual enemies. It also helped to hasten the
arrangement by which England exchanged
her inn rests in Samoa for another South

1 quid pro quo, and the four principal
islands were divided between Germany

59

Headquarters Nights

and America, two to each. The Ger-
mans got Savaii with its volcano and
Upolu with its cocoanut groves, while we
got beautiful Tutuila with its harbor and
little Manua without much of anything.

The money in use in Upolu, and in its
chief town, Apia, had been, for years,
English money, its lesser pieces known
to the natives as 'shillins' (accent on the
second syllable), 'seese-a-pennies,' and
'kolu-pennies,' kolu being the native
word for three. When the Germans took
full possession of Upolu, they, of course,
introduced their own currency. But the
natives persisted in calling a silver mark
a 'shillin,' and a fifty-pfennig piece a
'seese-a-penny.' A mark looked like a
shilling and it bought no more or less of
anything than a shilling; the same with
fifty-pfennigs and six-pence. Why new
names, then?

But though the natives persisted, the
Germans insisted. The Governor of Ger-
man Samoa — now head of a great de-

60

Headquarters Nights

partment of the Imperial German Gov-
ernment at Berlin — gave much time and
energy to trying to change 'shillin' to
mark. But he never succeeded. So with
a host of other trivial things. He could
tell a German to say this for that, or do
that for this, and it was said and done;
why not a Samoan? He could not under-
stand it. Apparently no German can
understand it.

So it has been in all the other one-
time German colonies. And so it has
been in Belgium.

Governor-General von Bissing died
from too much telling the Belgians to
do things — some important, many triv-
ial— and too much trying to make them
do them. He fumed and worried and suf-
fered because they would not behave
properly. Why would they not? Why
should not Belgians be managed as Ger-
mans are managed? Why would they
not? He djed unenlightened. lie had a
large stall' of subordinates: department

6j

Headquarters Nights

heads, provincial governors, and what
not. None of them enlightened him.
None of them could enlighten him. I
almost believe that no German could.

Von Bissing is dead and Von Falken-
hausen has stepped into his shoes, and
is going on trying to rule Belgium in the
same way. But he will succeed no bet-
ter. He will never know the Belgians,
as Solf did not know the Samoans, and
the statesmen and rulers of Germany do
not know the English, or the French, or
the Americans. How often have I been
asked, angrily, pathetically, always in-
sistently, 'Why do you Americans do as
you do? Germans would not.'

At first I tried to explain. But they
could not understand. Some few under-
stood that they did not understand, but
even they could not understand why they
did not, why they could not. I say some
few ; really I remember only one. He was
a business man of proved capacity. For
the moment, he was in an officer's uni-

62

Headquarters Nights

form and head of an important depart-
ment of Von Bissing's government; a
man of good mind, and university-trained.
Most of the German officers and officials
are men of good mind and university-
trained.

He said, 'You say we can't understand
other people, their minds, their points of
view, their feelings. Look at us in South
America. Our traders were getting the
best of the English traders and your own
keen Yankee traders. We understood
better than you the wants and business
methods of the South Americans. We
made the goods the way they wanted
them made; we packed them the way
they wanted them packed ; we gave them
credit in the way they preferred to
have it. We were more adaptable than
either you or the British. But — yes, it is
true, our statesmen do not understand
your statesmen or your people; our diplo-
mats do not understand the people to
whom we send them. Everything you

63
5

Headquarters Nights

do surprises them, disappoints them, dis-
mays them. And we lose by it. We suffer
by it. What is the reason?'

But he was the only one I remember
out of the many I talked with who un-
derstood that they did not understand.
And he himself did not really understand
that he did not understand the Belgians
whom he was helping to govern! He
thought they were just insolent liars and
rebels! Yes, because they did not do,
if they could help it at all, whatever and
everything the Germans ordered them to
do, they were 'rebels.'

Had not the German army beaten their
army and occupied their land? Well,
then, were they not rebels and traitors if
they did not do things that the Germans
told them to do, and did things that they
were told not to do? Could they not
learn to behave properly after having to
have thousands of their civilian citizens
and their women and children shot in
groups at the beginning, and hundreds

64

Headquarters Nights

shot scatteringly along through the weary-
ing months, and other hundreds sent to
prison in Germany?

' Idiots and ingrates, these Belgians.'
I use the word actually as used to me:
ingrates. For had not His Excellency,
Governor-General von Bissing, expressed
in a score or more of proclamations his
own interest and the interest of the Im-
perial German Government in the welfare
of the people? Had His Excellency not
actively displayed this interest by tangi-
ble things done for their advantage?

I studied earnestly for a moment, but
I had to ask for help. 'What things, for
example?' I asked.

'Well' — he studied too for a moment;
then triumphantly, 'Well, for example,
the reestablishment of the Flemish uni-
versity at Ghent. You ought to remem-
ber that, for I heard His Excellency tell
you that you could lecture there.'

I remember that saturnine jest. Gen-
eral von Bissing had reestablished the

65

Headquarters Nights

old Flemish university at Ghent just as
General von Beseler reestablished the old
Polish university at Warsaw — recently
closed, by the way. In Poland this was
a slap at Russophil Poles; in Belgium, a
slap at the ruling Walloons. Von Bissing
had arranged for fifty professors, some
German, some Dutch, and a few renegade
and bribable Flemish, to accept chairs at
Ghent. The bribe for these men was a
good immediate salary and a pension for
life after cessation — for cause — of teach-
ing.

That cessation will come the min-
ute that Belgium is free again, and the
cause will be a swift flight from the coun-
try. For not one of these renegade Flem-
ish professors can live in Belgium after
the Germans go out, nor even anywhere
within reach of Belgian vengeance. They
will urgently need their pensions.

With a grand flourish — but an all-
German flourish — the reestablished Flem-
ish university at Ghent opened with fifty

66

Headquarters Nights

professors — and forty students! These
students will need pensions, too.

My companion's remark about the
Governor-General's offer to let me lec-
ture at Ghent had reference to a grim
jest on the part of His Excellency. I had
acted for a few months in 19 15 as the
Relief Commission's director in Brussels,
on leave from my university in California,
but had had to return for the second half
of the college year. This finished, I went
back, at Mr. Hoover's request, to take
up the directorship again. Soon after my
arrival in Brussels, I made my call of
formality on Yon Bissing, in company with
the German head of the department
having chief cognizance of our relief
work.

The Governor-General received me not
unkindly, in his stiffly pleasant manner,
and said he hoped I would not have to
leave again while the relief work went
on, adding that, if I felt once more the
need of giving -mum- university lectures,

67

Headquarters Nights

I might give a course in the new uni-
versity at Ghent!

It was meant as a jest, but, as he knew
as well as I did what fate was in reserve
for the lecturers in his new university, it
had a grimness that made his smile, under
the stiff clipped mustache, no less awry
than mine. I had a horrible temptation,
fortunately resisted, to return jest for jest
by asking the figure of my pension.

All this great and affectionate interest
in matters and people Flemish, exhibited
by General von Bissing and his staff, and
by the German Chancellor and his Berlin
associates, and now by Von Schaibele,
the new special sub-governor for Flemish
Belgium, is so simple and obvious in its
reason and intent that it is nothing short
of astounding that any Germans, 'of good
mind and university- trained,' can, for a
moment, believe that it could fool any
one, least of all the people most imme-
diately concerned. The naive te of the
whole performance is simply pathetic.

68

Headquarters Nights

To hire a few cheap Flemings to come to
Berlin and do a stage chat with the chan-
cellor, and have their pictures taken in a
top-hatted group with him, and then ex-
pect to palm off this infantile perform-
ance as evidence of German and Flemish-
Belgian rapprochement, is to betray a
simplicity that is past conception. Copies
of that group photograph, as published
in Die Woche, are being religiously kept
by hundreds of Belgians as evidence,
when the time comes, on which to hang
these paid Flemish renegades. I hope
that they, like the professors, have been
pensioned, and have reserved future lodg-
ings in the heart of Germany. They will
be safe nowhere else — perhaps not there.
That is the simple, naive side of Ger-
man rule. There is another and fearfully
contrasting side. It is the side of blood
and iron. And Belgium has had full
nn-asure of laughable and tragic experi-
ence of both -ides. Her keen wits have
often bested tin rule of naivete — by pay-

Headquarters Nights

ing a fine; her bravest hearts have often
bested the rule of brutality — by paying
their lives. No week has passed in all the
many since Germany violated her own
honor, and that of Belgium, three years
ago, without a new Verordnung placarded
on the hoardings, prescribing some trivial
doing or not doing, — which meant smiles
and shrugs and quick little schemes of
avoidance to the reading Belgians; nor
has a week passed without some grim
court-martial running its fated course of
judicial travesty — which meant imprison-
ment or death to some devoted woman
or brave man of Belgium.

Some woman or some man, do I say?
Some tens or twenties of women and men,
I ought to say. The trials and condem-
nations at Hasselt alone are of scores at
a time.

70

II

The German government of Belgium
is three fourths strictly military and one
fourth quasi-civil. There is a Civil-Ver-
•waltung, or department of civil govern-
ment; a Politische Abteilung, or 'political'
department, having to do with the dip-
lomatic and general political relation of
the government to the Belgian people
generally, and the Belgian and American
relief organizations specially; a Bank-
Abteilung, whose most conspicuous activi-
ties have had relation to the forced re-
moval of 450,000,000 marks from the
vaults of two great Belgian banks to
those of the Reichsbank in Berlin, and
the putting of proper pressure on all the
Belgian banks to produce the huge
monthly indemnity, first of forty million
francs, then fifty, and now sixty, that is

Headquarters Nights

collected from Belgium by Germany; a
Press-Abteilung, presided over by a capa-
ble sculptor, which looks after the edit-
ing of all the Belgian newspapers — except
La Libre Belgique! — a Vermittlungsstelle, or
special bureau of the political depart-
ment, through which all negotiations of
the Belgian Comit6 National and the
American Commission with the German
government, either in Brussels or Berlin,
are taken up; a Central Harvest Com-
mission {Central Ernte Kommission), with
special charge of the native food-crops
and live stock (horses excepted) ; and last,
but very far from least, the Military ' In-
tendance, ' which represents the army's
interests and control.

In addition to these various chief de-
partments— and I may have overlooked
one or two; it does not matter — there is
a series of bureaus or organizations of
lesser rank, called Centrale, which take
special cognizance and charge of different

72

Headquarters Nights

kinds of local foodstuffs and related com-
modities.

The Central Harvest Commission
ought, perhaps, more properly to be
listed as the first and most important of
this group, rather than among the chief
departments as noted above. It is com-
posed of five German officials representing,
respectively, the Governor-General him-
self, the civil department, the bank de-
partment, the political department, and
the military department, and a Belgian
representing the Comite National, and an
American representing the Relief Com-
mission. The Belgian and American
members were tolerated rather than wel-
comed, and their voices, although heard,
rarely carried conviction to the already
unanimously convinced German members.
They had, however, full voting privilege,
but the minutes of the bi-monthly meet-
ings— solemn, formal affairs with an oc-
Ional relieving glimpse of uncovered
feeling and humanness — record a monot-

73

Headquarters Nights

onous list of motions carried by five voices
to two, and other motions lost by two to
five!

There are, in addition to the principal
Harvest Commission, a barley central;
an oats central, wholly in military hands;
a sugar central; a general fats and oils
central, with a special butter central; a
vegetables central, with special potato
and chicory centrals; a brandy central,
for the controlling and taxing of all alco-
holic production, this alcohol coming
chiefly from the yeast factories; and,
finally, a coal central, which, oddly
enough, controls the fertilizers as well as
coal.

I may also have overlooked a central
or two; but, again, it doesn't matter.
There were enough, if not too many;
enough, that is, to give a very plausible
seeming of what one expects from Ger-
man organization, namely, careful and
meticulous specialization and subdivision
of labor, responsibility, and authority, but

74

H e a d q u a r t e r s Nights

all tied together and subject to the supe-
rior understanding and direction.

At a distance, the German government
of Belgium seems admirably organized
and even well managed. At close range,
especially at the close range of personal
contact and experience, it reveals itself
as absurdly over-organized and ineffi-
ciently managed. The German govern-
ment of Belgium has proved itself incapa-
ble, except in those matters where results
were got by sheer brutal force alone — and
in these the force has been too often used
blindly as well as brutally — and has never
satisfied the Germans themselves, either
in Belgium or in Berlin. This is a state-
ment that I can make with confidence
and without breach of confidence. For it
is well known in Holland, which sees and
knows by one means or another practi-
cally all that goes on in Belgium and
Germany.

Governor-General von Bissing wished
to gain a certain measure of Belgian ap-

75

Headquarters Nights

proval of his administration of the coun-
try. His first approval, naturally, should
come from Berlin; his second, from Ger-
many; his third, if there could be any-
thing for Belgians to approve of what
must first be commended by Berlin and
Germany, was to come from Belgium.
And he really wanted this approval.

Hopeless cynics might explain his de-
sire simply as dictated by pure personal
selfishness and ambition. A successful
civil administration should receive some
measure of approval from the adminis-
tered". Von Bissing's government was al-
ways a quasi-civil government. He would
commend himself and his administration
to his over-lords if things went fairly
quietly in Belgium. But he would not if
Berlin's already fatigued ears had to be
assaulted by the disquieting rattle of ma-
chine-guns in the streets of Brussels and
Antwerp, and the screams, groans, and
last sobbing coughs of the dying Bruxellois
and Anversois. The world seemed in-

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Headquarters Nights

clined to give a too attentive ear to noises
from Belgium, and Berlin's own ears,
usually only too deaf to the cries of the
tortured, had become, by virtue of this
fact, a little sensitive also to sounds from
Brussels. It is a popular belief that Ber-
lin cares not a rap for the world outside.
But this is not true. She does care, and
does not at all relish being so continually
and distressfully 'misunderstood.' What
is true is that it is only with the utmost
difficulty, and only rarely, that Berlin can
understand what the reaction of the
world outside is going to be to German
behavior. I believe that it is chiefly this
limitation that is leading Germany to
defeat and near-destruction.

But I am not a hopeless cynic — to get
back to the matter of General von Bis-
sing's rather pathetic desire for Belgian
approval. And I think that the past
governor's wish was based partly on less
questionable grounds than pure selfish-
ness. He had in some degree a feeling of

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Headquarters Nights

personal responsibility for the five million
or more human bodies and souls, nameless
and hardly distinguishable to him, with
social traditions and natural inheritance
utterly uncomprehended by him, which
had, by the inexplicable hazards of hu-
man fate, been thrust, willy-nilly, into
his hands. It would be a bit too super-
mannish not to feel a little anxious, for
the people's own sake, about the fate of
individuals in such a mass of people,
hanging ever on the verge of starvation
and kept from literal destruction only by
the interference of an incomprehensible
foreign neutral organization.

But, some way, for whatever Governor
von Bissing was able to do, there was not
approval enough to go around. After
Berlin and Germany had approved, there
was never any to come from Belgium.
In the face of what he did, or allowed to
be done, how in the name of humanity, of
honor, and of what there is of God in
man, could there be?

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Headquarters Nights

And so the Germans in Belgium have
been an ostracized people. The Belgians
on the streets look another way as they
pass the spurred, field-gray officers. The
German soldiers have learned to ride on
the platforms of the tramcars; it is less
chilling there than inside. The few open
hotels and shops have become differen-
tiated into places for Germans and places
for Belgians. It is an odd victory that
these conquered people win over their
conquerors every day.

For the Germans feel it. They have
wanted friendly civil treatment from the
Belgians; they have tried in their un-
comprehending, unsympathetic, stiffly
patronizing, semi-contemptuous way to
get it, and they have expected it. Indeed,
it was more than civility, it was deference
that they first expected — in parts of oc-
cupied France the people have to salute
the German officers or get shot — but
when the deference was seen to be hope-
less, they expected civility.

79

6

Headquarters Nights

Well, they have not got it; they have
not had it. And this complete withhold-
ing of Belgian approval of the German
administration, and the complete lack of
any personal rapprochement between Ger-
man officers and officials and Belgians
during the long period of enforced rela-
tionship and companionship, is, to me,
vivid evidence of two things: Belgian
spirit, and German mal-administration
and utter lack of human consideration of
the people and persons they are ruling
and professing to be trying to placate,
befriend, and elevate. For the Belgians
are no more than human, and human con-
sideration would inevitably have had its
usual effect in some visible measure.

This condition is also a sufficient proof,
if the world needs further proof, of the
utter inability of the Germans to help the
world in its efforts to humanize and so-
cialize and lift up its peoples. Even were
German Kultur that most desirable thing
that the German intellectuals have said

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Headquarters Nights

it is — and that most of us are convinced
it is not — the Germans are utterly un-
able to make it over to any other people.
The Ninety-Three Intellectuals were
quite sure that Germany could spread
and bestow its Kultitr on the backward
nations of the earth by conquering them
by arms. But Kultitr cannot be imposed
on a people, even though its rule can.
The Belgians are ruled by German Kultitr,
but they are not penetrated by it.

From the depths of their bleeding
hearts they execrate it. They have
seen what it does to a people — to two
peoples, the Germans and themselves.
It makes brutes and martyrs: brutes of
its possessors, martyrs of those who
conn- in contact with its possessors.

rman Kuliur stifles the good in man
for the good of a man-made Juggernaut
called the State.

Whatever headway any German
singly might have been able to make in
gaining the tolerance or friendship of

Ki

Headquarters Nights

the Belgians — and there have been and
are to-day individual Germans in Bel-
gium of a certain warmth of heart and
human sympathy — this man, as member
of the German administrative organiza-
tion in Belgium, was no longer 'any Ger-
man singly,' but a nameless, individual-
less, rigid little cog on one of the myriad
wheels of the Great German Machine.
He could move only as his wheel moved,
which in turn moved — or should move —
only in perfect relation to the moving of
the other wheels.

This 'any German singly' gave up, in
all matters in which he acted as a part of
the German administration, all of the
thinking, all of the feeling, all of the con-
science which might be characteristic of
him as an individual, a free man, a sep-
arate soul made sacred by the touch of
the Creator. And he did this to accept
the control and standards of an imper-
sonal, intangible, inhuman, great cold
fabric made of logic and casuistry and

82

V

Headquarters Nights

utter, utter cruelty, called the State — or
often, for purposes of deception, the
Fatherland. There is fatherland in Ger-
many, but it is not the German State. It
is German soil and German ancestry, but
not the horrible, depersonalized, super-
organic state machine, built and managed
by a few ego-maniacs of incredible selfish-
ness and of utter callousness to the suffer-
ings, bodily and mental, of their own as
well as any other people in their range of
contact.

But this machine is a Frankenstein that
will turn on its own creators and work
their destruction, together with its own.
Such sacrifice and stultification of human
personality as national control by such a
machine requires, can have no perma-
nence in a world moving certainly, even if
hesitatingly and deviously, toward indi-
vidualism and the recognition of personal
\ .dues.

Ill

The experience of our Relief Commis-
sion with this machine has been wearing.
It has also been illuminating. For it has
resulted in the conversion of an idealistic
group of young Americans of open mind
and fairly neutral original attitude, into a
band of convinced men, most of whom,
since their forced retirement from Bel-
gium, have ranged themselves among
four armies devoted to the annihilation
of that machine and to the rescue and
restoration of that one of its victims, the
sight of whose mangling and suffering
brought unshed tears to the eyes and silent
curses to the lips of these Americans so
often during the long two and a half
years of the relief work.

We were not haters of Germany when
we went to Belgium. We have simply,

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Headquarters Nights

by inescapable sights and sounds and
knowledge forced on us, been made into
what we have become. If we hate Prus-
sians and Prussianism now, it is because
Prussia and Prussianism have taught us
to hate them. Whom have they ever
taught to love them?

The work of the Relief Commission
was carried on under a series of guaran-
ties given by the succeeding German
governors-general, the Berlin Foreign
Office, and the Great General Staff of
the German armies. These guaranties
committed the German authorities, from
the beginning of the work, to the non-
requisition of the food-supplies imported
into Belgium and to non-interference
with our distribution of these supplies.
Later they included the non-requisition
of the food-stuffs produced within the
country, and the non-purchase of these
native crops for the use of the German
army. Also they contained the positive
promise that the Commission should en-

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Headquarters Nights

joy all reasonable facilities to do its benef-
icent work and to be able to satisfy itself
that the guaranties as to non-requisition
and purchase were strictly lived up to.

In general these guaranties have been
maintained; the one respecting the non-
requisition of the imported supplies in
particular has been scrupulously regarded.
Of course, if it had not been, the work
would have stopped abruptly at the mo-
ment of its disregard. But in detail, in the
relationship with German officialdom and
German soldiery, made necessary in the
carrying on of the work, difficult in itself
under the most favorable circumstances,
we were harassed and delayed and tricked
and bullied in a thousand ways, but al-
most always under cover of a sophisticated
and specious reasoning. A German offi-
cial is no less plausible than brutal.
There was always a protracted debate, a
delaying argument, an exasperating show
of consideration and conference, when-
ever we protested and pleaded and de-

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Headquarters Nights

mandcd that our work be not interfered
with.

The dying of children, the weakening of
women and men, the advance of disease,
were not arguments that we could push
forward to our advantage; there was al-
ways a convenient 'military exigency' to
put these summarily out of court. The
argument had to turn on the form of
words in the guaranties; this was suscep-
tible of debate, this was a matter to con-
sider.

The machine seemed to have a curi-
ous regard for our 'scraps of paper'
except when it was more convenient to
disregard them entirely, which was not
often, although always possible. In this
respect we were constantly surprised,
having always in mind the original noto-
rious scrap-of-paper incident. Perhaps
the machine has become a little sensitive
to paper troubl<

A prolific source of difficulty for us was
the lack of clear demarcation among the

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Headquarters Nights

many wheels and parts of the machine,
and a lack of coordination among these
bits of mechanism. But sharp special-
ization and thorough coordination are
generally supposed to be exactly the basis
of the reputed high organization and effi-
ciency of the German government. Be
that true of all the rest of German admin-
istration or not, I do not know; I only
know it is not true of German adminis-
tration in Belgium. A difficulty over the
movement of canal boats; over the cen-
soring and transmission of our necessary
mails between the Brussels central offices
and the provinces; over the circulation of
our workers and their motor-cars ; over the
printing and posting of our protecting
placards on warehouses and railway
wagons; or over what not else — it made
no difference. Never was there a well-
defined course of procedure for us; never
could we quickly find the proper depart-
ment of the government to which to apply
and from which to obtain decision in any

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Headquarter s N i g h t s

of these and the many other cases of
trouble.

It was indeed precisely because of this
constant uncertainty, and a final recog-
nition of the difficulty by Governor-Gen-
eral von Bissing, that there was finally
established — just a year after the relief
work was begun — the Vermittlungsstelle,
to which all our troubles were first to be
referred, to be in turn passed on by it into
the whirring interior of the creaking ma-
chine, there to be whirled around until
some kind of final or provisional decision
was ejected.

But these interior processes of diges-
tion and resynthesis — for what went in
always came out in a different form —
took time, and time too often freighted
with awful significance to the helpless,
waiting, hungering Belgians. But the
machine took little account of human
suffering, or human lives, even. It took
the tim<- that its incapacity made neces-
sary, and turned out its work in the in-

Headquarters Nights

complete or distorted form that its clum-
siness assured. This must seem, in the
face of the popular conception of German
administrative organization, like uncon-
sidered and exaggerated writing. But
it is not. It is the revelation of simple
truth.

Under whatever detailed guaranties,
or on the basis of no matter how elab-
orate regulations, an inevitable require-
ment for the carrying on of our work
was a certain element of trust by the
German authorities in the correct be-
havior of our American workers. The
struggle between German officialdom's
need for an absolute control of us, be-
cause any or all of us were potential spies
— we were, of course — and the impossi-
bility, under existing circumstances, of
establishing any such effective control,
resulted in a state of affairs that was ludi-
crous when it was not too irritating to be
anything else.

The control was attempted by a rigor-

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Headquarters Nights

ous set of restrictive rules concerning the
movements of the Americans and their
cars, prohibitions against carrying any
letters except certain censored official
ones, and a careful reissuing of passes each
month for all of the men connected with
the relief work. Our compliance with
these insulations was checked on all motor
trips by a regular inspection of passes,
including the special ones of chauffeur
and motor, a recording of the movement
of the car, and sometimes an examination
of the contents of bag and pockets, at all
the sentry posts scattered along the roads.
These posts were so abundant in the early
days — when there were soldiers to spare —
that we would be stopped a dozen times
between Brussels and Antwerp, less than
a two-hour trip. In addition to the regu-
lar inspection, there was another irregular
one, which consisted of the sudden halting
of the ear any day anywhere along the
road by a group of military-sccret-service
men, who made a close examination, not

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Headquarters Nights

only of passes and papers, but of cars and
persons. The cars would be fairly taken
to pieces, tires deflated and searched, and
gasoline tanks fished in. The examination
of the clothing and bodies of our men was
no less thorough — and more disgusting.

Now all this was good control to pre-
vent— what? It prevented our carrying
any persons unauthorized to travel by
motor, or any dangerous information in
letters, from one part of Belgium to an-
other— from Brussels to Antwerp, say.
But these possible would-be travelers
could go without hindrance or examination
from Brussels to Antwerp by any one of
several trains a day, or by a combination
of tram-lines and buses, or on foot. What
they might not do was to joy-ride! And
if we wished to carry any dangerous in-
formation we certainly should not have
confided it to letters, but should simply
have taken it as told us or discovered by
us, and made it over to whomever we
cared to, provided he could understand

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Headquarters Nights

our kind of French. We were allowed —
the circumstances of the work made it ab-
solutely necessary, as the German authori-
ties recognized — to talk when and where
and to whom we pleased.

More than this and much more impor-
tant than this, we sent out — with the
consent, of course, of the Germans — three
times a week, a mail courier from Brussels
through the electrified wire fence and
across the Belgian frontier into Holland.
The mails he carried had been censored
and sealed — the seals to be examined at
the frontier — and he was subject to
search, regular and irregular, at any time
before reaching the wire. But he was a
very intelligent young man, who spoke
French, German, Flemish, Dutch, and
English, and when in Holland was free to
tell any one there — and Holland's popu-
lation is, at present, most interestingly
cosmopolitan — or write to any one any-
where— to a man in England, say, with an
interest in matters in Belgium— anything

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Headquarters Nights

he pleased. In Holland he had but one
control — his honor. And there was an
alternate courier with this same privilege,
and several others of us had to go out often
to Holland. Mr. Hoover and myself went
back and forth often — Mr. Hoover very
often and more or less regularly — between
London and Belgium. In other words, if
we could not be trusted, there was abso-
lutely no hindrance in the German scheme
of control to our conveying information
at any time to the enemy. And yet the
exercise of the absurd control attempted
was evidence that we were not trusted.
The repeated personal examinations, care-
fully planned to catch any guilty one off
his guard, outraged our sense of honor —
and decency. The whole situation might
well have stimulated a man to accept the
implication of dishonesty which it placed
on him as a recognition that he might spy,
if he could get away with it! All this
absurd pseudo-control was stupid in the
psychology that dictated it, and stupid in

94

H e a d q u a r t e r s Nights

the method of its carrying out. It was
inexpedient and inefficient.

And it was unnecessary. We were not
spies, and the German officials knew it.
If we were, or if they really thought we
were, their only sensible and safe action
would have been to remove us. But
knowing that we were not spying — in
a few cases in which some over-eager
'flat-foot' thought he had found proof
that we were, we were able brilliantly
to prove the contrary — they neverthe-
less treated us in a way to make us feel and
seem suspect, though not in a way which
would have prevented us from spying
and informing had we really been inclined
to. That is machinery, but not brains.
And wheels can never really replace brain-
cells in human functioning.

95

IV

However, a pacifist, or a neutral, is
hardly to be made into an adherent of a
war against any people on the basis of
being ever so convinced of the stupidity
of that people's form of government, or
because of an ego-maniacal overestimate,
on the part of this people, of its form of
Kultur. And it was something more
than any conviction of this kind that
turned our group of American neutrals in
German-occupied Belgium and North
France into a shocked, then bitter, and
finally blazing, band of men wishing to
slay or be slain, if necessary, to prevent
the repetition anywhere of the things
they had to see done in these tortured
lands.

The Germans entered Belgium in Au-
gust and September, 1914; we began to

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Headquarters Nights

come in November. Hence we saw none
of the 'atrocities' of the invasion — we saw
only results of them. Among these re-
sults, as seen by us, were, I hasten to say,
no women without breasts or children
without hands. But there were women
without husbands and sens and daughters,
and children without mothers and fathers.
There were families without homes, farms
without cattle or horses or houses, towns
without town halls and churches and most
of the other buildings, and even some
without any buildings at all, and a few
without many citizens. But there were
cemeteries with scores and hundreds of
new graves — not of soldiers; and little
toddling children who came up eagerly to
you, saying, ' Mon pere est mort; ma mere
est morte.' They were distinguished from
some of their playmates by this, you see!
And we had to hear — and endure — the
stories, the myriad stories, of the relicts
of Dinant, Vis6, Tamines, Andennes, and
all the rest. Of course, there were stories

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Headquarters Nights

exaggerated wilfully, and others exagger-
ated unintentionally, simply by the in-
evitable inaccuracies that come from ex-
citement and mental stress. But there
were stories that were true, all true.

If we had had but to make acquaintance
this way with happenings of the days be-
fore we came! But there was no escape
for us; the civilizing of Belgium did not
cease with the terrible rush over the land
to the final trench-lines in the West. It
kept, and is keeping, everlastingly on.
And we had to see it, and hear it, and
feel it. We had to see the citizens of a
proud and beautiful capital barred from
walking in certain of its streets and parks,
that elderly Landsturmers and schneidige
boy officers might stroll and smoke there;
and to be sent indoors to bed every night
for a fortnight at eight o'clock to learn
to be deferential and friendly to soldiers
who had slain their relatives and friends,
not in the heat of battle, but at cool dawn
in front of stone-walls.

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Headquarters Nights

And we had to be there the fateful
night of Nurse Cavell's death; and the
days and nights of many other like
deaths and travestied trials that pre-
ceded them. And we had to make the
acquaintanceship of noble men and
women, giving all the hours of all their
days to the relief and encouragement of
their people, only to have them disap-
pear, carried off without an opportunity
for a good-bye, for imprisonment in Ger-
many, because of some trivial word or
act of indignation at the sufferings of
their people. Which carrying off brings
us to the final word : Deportations.

There have been deportations of one
kind or another from Belgium ever since
the war began. Removal to Germany
has been a punishment much favored by
the German authorities for indiscreet or
too uncomfortable Belgians. Hut most
of these removals have been made of
Citizens singly or in small groups, usually
after a military trial; and the official morn-

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Headquarters Nights

ing placards on the street walls have
announced the alleged special reason for
each removal and the particular period of
years to be suffered by the victim in Ger-
many. Or, rather, did until it seemed
better — or worse for the friends — not to
make any announcements at all.

But these removals are not what the
world understands by deportations. The
world knows hazily of the rapid gath-
ering together and sending in large gangs
to Germany — or to regions in occupied
France near the west front — of thousands,
tens of thousands, altogether a total of
something more than one hundred thou-
sand ablebodied Belgian men. With the
exception of a few flax-workers from West
Flanders, no women were sent away, as
some sensational newspaper accounts have
declared.

The world knows too, hazily, that these
deportations were made in many, perhaps
most, instances in a peculiarly brutal and
revolting manner, with a treatment of

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Headquarters Nights

human beings comparable only with that
which might have been given to an equal
number of cattle, sheep, or swine driven
to the railways, held in yards in the rain
or sun for a cursory examination for
possible infectious disease and physical
condition generally — for the importers
wanted only sound animals— and then
packed tightly into box-cars with enough
feed and water for the trip to the distant
abattoirs — enough feed, that is, if the
trains got through on schedule, which
they never did.

The world knows this hazily, I say.
Much has been written about this de-
porting; about its causes, the conditions
that incited German authority to do it —
it was the highest military authority that
decreed it, not Von Bissing's Belgian gov-
ernment,— the manner of its doing, its
results. But the world needs the whole
story. Unfortunately it cannot yet be
written. Among other things lacking is
the knowledge of just how many of the

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Headquarters Nights

hundred thousand Belgian slaves have
died and are to die in Germany. Some
have been sent back hastily, so that they
would not die in Germany; they die on
the returning trains, or soon after they
get back. Or, what is worse, some do
not die, but continue to live, helpless
physical wrecks.

The deportations were not hazy to us.
They were the most vivid, shocking, con-
vincing single happening in all our en-
forced observation and experience of
German disregard of human suffering and
human rights in Belgium. We did not
see the things that happened to the de-
ported men in Germany. But we could
not help knowing some of them. When
the wrecks began to be brought back —
the starved and beaten men who would
not sign the statements that they had
voluntarily gone to Germany to work! and
the starved and beaten ones who would not
work at all; and the ones who could not
work even when, driven by fear of pun-

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Headquarters Nights

ishment, they tried to, on the acorn soup
and sawdust bread of the torture camps —
when these poor wrecks came back, they
brought their experiences with them, and
revealed them by a few words and the
simple exhibition of their scarred and
emaciated bodies.

The deportations occurred near the end
of the period of our stay in Belgium.
They were the final and the fully sufficient
exhibit, prepared by the great German
Machine, to convince absolutely any one
of us who might still have been clinging to
his original desperately maintained atti-
tude of neutrality, that it was high time
that we were somewhere else — on the
other side of the trench-line, by preference.
There could be no neutrality in the face
of the deportations; you are for that kind
of thing, or you are against it.

We are against it; America is against it;
most of the civilized nations are against
it. That is the hope of the world.

103

A Belgian Record

A BELGIAN RECORD

In connection with the subject of the
Belgian deportations, the following trans-
lation, made by Professor Kellogg, of a
memorial sent to Governor-General von
Bissing about December I, 1916, by a
group of prominent burghers of Antwerp,
will be of interest. It is new to the
American public.

To His Excellency Baron von Bissing,

Governor of Belgium, in Brussels:
Your Excellency,

By virtue of an Order of the Military
Governor of Antwerp, rendered in accord-
ance with the instructions of the German
General Government in Belgium, dated
November 2, 1916, our citizens without
work whose names are on the lists of the
Registry Office {Meldeamt) are instructed

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Headquarters Nights

to present themselves immediately at the
Southern Railway Station. From there
they will be transported, by force if neces-
sary, into Germany, where they will be
compelled to take up work which will be
assigned to them. The same measures
have been taken in the rest of the country.
Without having committed crime, and
without trial, thousands of our free citi-
zens are being thus deported, against
their will, into an enemy land, far from
their homes, far from their wives and their
children. They are being submitted to
that most terrible treatment for free men :
being forced to labor as slaves.

We, Deputies, Senators, and notables
of Antwerp and its environs, would be-
lieve ourselves recreant to all our duty if
we allowed such things to occur under our
eyes, without resorting to the right that
we have of addressing the executive power
under any circumstances, in order to
make known to it our griefs and our pro-
tests.

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Headquarters Nights

By what right is this forced labor with
deportation introduced into our unhappy
country? We seek in vain for a response
to this question. The Rights of the
People condemn such a measure.

There is no modern author who justifies
it. The articles of the Convention of
The Hague, defining requisitions made for
the benefit of an occupying army, are
directly opposed to such a measure.

The constitutional right of all European
countries, including Germany, is not less
opposed to it.

The most illustrious of your sovereigns,
Frederick the Second, has regarded and
honored as a dogma, individual liberty
and the right of every citizen to dispose
of his capacities and of his work as he
wishes. An occupying authority ought
to respect these essential principles which
haw been the common patrimony of
humanity for centuries.

It cannot be denied that the Belgian
deported workers, under the conditions

109

Headquarters Nights

created by this action, will set free a
proportional number of German workers
to go to the front to fight the brothers and
sons of the deported Belgians. This
makes them forced partakers in the war
against our country, something that
Article 52 of the Convention of The Hague
prohibits in express terms. That is not
all. Immediately after the occupation of
Antwerp, thousands of our citizens had
fled the country and taken refuge in that
part of Holland stretching along the
Belgian frontier, but the German au-
thorities made most reassuring declara-
tions to them.

On October 9th, 1914, General von Bes-
eler, Commander-in-Chief of the besieging
army, gave to negotiators from Contich a
declaration stating: 'Unarmed members
of the Civic Guard will not be considered
as prisoners of war.'

Under the same date, Lieutenant-
General von Schutz, the German Com-
mander of the Fort of Antwerp, gave out

no

Headquarters Nights

the following proclamation: 'The under-
signed, Commander of the Fort of Ant-
werp, declares that nothing stands in the
way of the return of inhabitants to their
country. None of them will be molested;
even the members of the Civic Guard, if
they are unarmed, may return in all
security.'

On the 16th of November, 1914, Car-
dinal Mercier communicated to the popu-
lation a declaration signed by General
Huene, Military Governor of Antwerp,
in which the General said, for purposes of
general publication: 'Young men have
nothing to fear from being taken to Ger-
many, either to be enrolled in the army or
to be employed at forced labor.' A little
later the eminent prelate requested Baron
von der Goltz, Governor-General of Bel-
gium, to ratify for the whole country,
without limit as to time, these guaranties
which General Huene has given for the
Province of Antwerp. He was successful
in obtaining this.

1 11

B

Headquarters Nights

Finally, on the 18th of October, 1914,
the military authorities of Antwerp gave
a signed statement to the representative
of General von Terwiega, Commander of
the Holland Field Army, to the effect that
the young Belgian men and unarmed
members of the Belgian Civic Guard
could return from Holland into Belgium
and would not be molested. One of his
sentences was: 'The rumor according
to which the young Belgian men will be
sent into Germany ... is without
any foundation.'

Upon the faith of these solemn public
declarations, numerous citizens, not alone
of Antwerp but of all parts of the country,
have returned across the Holland-Bel-
gium frontier to their own hearth-stones.
Now these very men who, once free, re-
turned to Belgium, relying upon the formal
engagements of the German authorities,
will be sent to-morrow into Germany,
there to be forced to undertake that
labor of slaves which it has been promised

112

Headquarters Nights

would never be put upon them. Under
these conditions, we believe it right to
demand that the measures taken for these
deportations be countermanded. We add
that the agreement of Contich formally
stipulated that the members of the Civic
Guard would not be treated as prisoners
of war. Surely, then, there can be no
question of transferring them to Ger-
many to give them a treatment even more
severe.

The preamble of the Order for the de-
portation seems to reproach our workers
with their idleness, and it invokes the
needs of public order and regrets the in-
creasing charges of public charity to take
care of these men. We beg to remark
to Your Excellency that, at the time of
the entrance of the German armies into
Belgium, there were in this country large
stocks of raw materials whose transfor-
mation into manufactured articles would
have occupied innumerable workers for
a long time. But the8e Stocks of raw

113

Headquarters Nights

materials have been taken from us and
carried to Germany.

There were factories completely
equipped which could have been used to
produce articles for exportation into neu-
tral countries. But the machines and the
tools of these factories have been sent to
Germany.

Certainly it is true that our workers
have refused work offered by the occupy-
ing authorities, because this work tended
to assist these authorities in their military
operations. Rather than win large wages
at this price they have preferred to accept
privation. Where is the patriot, where is
the man of heart, who would not applaud
these poor people for this dignity and this
courage?

No reproach of idleness can really be
made to our worker classes who, it is well
known everywhere, are second to none
in their ardor for work.

The Order refers in addition to the
necessity of good order, and refers also to

114

Headquarters Nights

the necessity of not allowing an increasing
number of workless people to become a
burden on the public charity.

Public order has never caused trouble.
As to charitable assistance, it is true that
millions of francs have been spent in
charity since the beginning of the war, but,
for the accomplishment of this immense
effort of benevolence, nothing has been
asked from the German government, nor
even from the Belgian Treasury, ad-
ministered under your control and fed by
our taxes. There should be, then, no
anxiety on the part of Germany concern-
ing this money, which in no way comes
from it. Indeed, Your Excellency well
knows that this money does not even
come from immediate public charity, but
is arranged for by the Comit6 National,
which will continue to arrange for it in
the future-, as it has in the past .

None, then, of the motives invoked to
support the Order of deportations seems
to Ufl to have any foundation.

>«5

Headquarters Nights

One would seek in vain in all the history
of war for a precedent for this action.
Neither in the wars of the Revolution,
nor of the Empire, nor in any which have
since that time desolated Europe, has
anyone struck at the sacred principle of
the individual liberty of the non-combat-
ant and peaceful populations.

Where will one stop in this war, if
reasons of State can justify such treat-
ment? Even in the colonies forced labor
exists no longer.

Therefore, we pray Your Excellency to
take into consideration all that we have
just said, and to return to their homes
those unfortunates who have already
been sent into Germany in accordance
with the Order of November 2, 191 6.

116

OTHER VOLUMES IN THE SERIES OF
ATLANTIC PAPERS

PERMANENT IN INTEREST
PERMANENT IN FORM

THE WAR AND THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH

This book is a spiritual interpretation of the suffering
and sacrifice of the World War, expressed in a group of
three papers of kindred significance, yet written from
three different points of view by a Frenchman, an
Englishman, and an American. The volume includes:

Young Soldiers of France, By Maurice Barres.
The Soul's Experience, By Sir Francis Younghusband.
Juventus Christi, By Anne C. E. Allinson.

Each writer is seeking in the dreadful welter of war
some common revelation of spiritual comfort and
advance. Is the agony of these years meaningless and
wanton? Is the heartsickening struggle brutal and
brutalizing, and nothing more? Each, in his or her own
way, finds an answer.

One, a questioner by temperament, has come to see,
to his own amazement, the regeneration of human life
in the miracle which the war has worked in the younger
generation. Another, by profession a soldier, went
unscathed and unbelieving through the perilous march
to Lhassa, only to find, as the result of a grave and
disabling accident, a new and vivid faith born of phys-
ical impotence and pain. The third, an American
woman, whose adventures are of the spirit, has come
to her new belief from far distant fields of the imagina-
tion. All three unite in confidence that the generation
now culminating in manhood is passing through black-
ness into light brighter than any dawn we have known.

The spirit of the volume is the spirit of youth, learn-
ing in the Book of Life, trusting that the best is yet to
be, and reading with shining eyes to the end. It is the
spirit of Leo Latil, a young soldier of France, who,
shortly before his death on the edge of a German trench,
wrote to his family:

"Our sacrifices will be sweet if we win a great and glorious victory,
— if there shall be more light for the souls of men; if truth shall
come forth more radiant, more beloved. We must not forget that
we are fighting for great things — for the very greatest things. In
every sense this victory of ours will be a victory for the forces of
idealism."

' The War and the Spirit of Youth' is an inspiring,
heartening little volume. It is well printed, handsomely
bound, and sells postpaid for one dollar.

The Atlantic Monthly Press
Three Park Street, Boston

THE ASSAULT ON HUMANISM
Rv Paul Shorey

The Battle of the Books is as keen today as it was in
the time of the Renaissance. Within the last decade,
especially, the forces of the 'old' and the 'new'
learning have been at full tilt. Under the leadership
of Dr. Abraham Flcxncr, President Eliot, and other
distinguished members of the 'new school,' practical
education has gained an apparent ascendancy, and the
champions of classical culture have been put on the
defensive.

Vet the classicists are not \ am pushed — not by any
means; and it is not likely that they ever will be, so
long as they have such leaders as Professor Shorey.

The Assault on HUMANISM is a brilliant offensive-
defensive on the study of the classics in American
schools and colleges. So ably does the author marshal
his forces against the ' Modernists, ' so effectively does
he use his sarcastic wit and his vast fund of learning,
that his writing in itself is an argument of the first
order for retaining the study of cultural subjects.

"We are again gTateful to Dr. Fle.xner. If it had not been for
his attack upon classical and humanistic culture, Professor Shorey
might never have written this delightful and inspiring little volume,
and the world would have been so much — and it would indeed
have been much— poorer." ^^ York Tribune.

"Professor Shorey upholds the standard of sound learning and
literary culture — qualities which are in need of defenders in a land
where the half-educated are at present more aggressive than the
educated. Professor Shorey says to his antagonists: 'You must
not argue that Latin is useless, without discrimin.it ing the various
meanings of utility. You must r.ot tell the public that the science
of psychology has disproved mental discipline in general, or the
specific value of the discipline of analytic language study in par-
ticular. For, if you are a competent psychologist, you know that
it is false.' " Springfield Republican.

"If Professor Shorey's literary style, the wealth of information
which his article shows, the clearness of oil an liness

and the aptness of his illustrations, are any Indil ation "f the results
produced by the study of the humanities, he has in this article gone
far t i • desirability of a system of education in whirh these

humanities have a prominent part " The African School.

Thb Assault on Humanism is a charming example
of bookmaldng. It sella postpaid for 60 cents.

The Atlami' MONTHLY Pri

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